MacPorts Base vs. Snow Leopard 64 bit environment

Question

Since I use 10.5 I'm quite happy that a whole lot of stuff is working currently like it should. However there's this Snow Leopard DVD next to my desk that just seems to say "Install me". If I do:

Do I have to recompile the whole MacPorts stuff because of the 64 bit switch? When I upgraded from Tiger this wasn't necessary.

Answer 1

Quoting their website:

An installation of MacPorts and the ports installed by it are only designed to work on a single OS release and a single CPU architecture. If you upgrade to a new OS version (e.g. from Tiger to Leopard) or migrate to a new machine with a different type of CPU (e.g. PowerPC to Intel), you may get lucky and have your ports keep working, but in general, things will break.

You can also check out the list of ports I've tested to work in Snow Leopard.

Answer 2

you need to completely reinstall macports 1.8 when you migrate from 10.5 to 10.6. macports does not support migration. the tool(s) won't tell you that, but will give various esoteric messages that will frustrate you because it ALMOST works if you do various forms of manual upgrades. but you'll be chasing those problems for a while. these problems were similar when historically migrating from tiger to leopard.

one of the key things Apple is trying to do with Snow Leopard is to surreptitiously get the whole world to migrate to true 64-bit computing, and to abandon PPC as well and fat binaries and all that jazz. those are the two underlying shifts in environment that will cause problems for you if you try to do this migration piece-meal.

after you've uninstalled, you also need to install the new xcode version. it'll be on the Snow Leopard DVD, but it won't install unless you explicitly install it from the optional folder.

before you uninstall (or just move /opt/local), make sure to save the output of "port installed | grep active" to a text file so you can reference what you had installed. then do a clean new install of macports in the usual way, and install the packages from your list that you know you'll be using again.

Answer 3

In my case, most stuff that was already installed under MacPorts still worked after installing 10.6. However, the 'port' command itself is broken. While there might be some way to bootstrap in a fix, I think I'm just going to dump my old MacPorts installation and reinstall from MacPorts-*-SnowLeopard.dmg

Answer 4

Unfortunately, wine is a bit of a problem still. It relies on various other components which need to be compiled in 32 bit or universal mode, but by default aren't.

Here's what I did to get wine-devel (this is the 'bleeding-edge' alternative to the wine port) running on Snow Leopard:

sudo port upgrade --enforce-variants expat fontconfig freetype jpeg libiconv libxml2 libxslt ncurses openssl zlib mesa +universal
sudo port install wine-devel

Answer 5

IMHO, Snow Leopard is the first OS X release where most end users won't experience all that much new good stuff and if you are happy with your installation, there is no reason to upgrade.

Answer 6

I had trouble with the MySQL 32bit version that was installed. I had installed this version because Perl wouldn't build DBD::mysql for the 64bit version. Now I've installed the MySQL 5.4 64 and 32 bit packages and could not build DBD::mysql for either (it had to be rebuilt because perl got changed with 10.6), but forcing the install on the 64bit version so far has worked for me, despite failing tests.

Other than that, I don't use MacPorts. I personally feel that it's wrong-headed to maintain a set of patches to port software. Useful yes, but ultimately it puts no pressure on the up-stream developers (some of whom are actually trying to directly target MacOS 10.5 and 10.6, bravo), and it suffers from maintainer burn-out, as packages will at times be outdated. The worst scenario is when an outdated package would take a lot of effort to maintain for the ports system, but the upstream source is totally effortless for the target system.

Answer 7

In a way Leopard is also 64 bits in that it supports 64 apps, even though the OS itself is only 32 bits. If you do the upgrade there should be no reason to recompile, unless of course you want something to run as 64 bit. The only incompatibility I've found is Growl. Eveything else, be it 32 or 64 bit, runs just fine. The only significant differences I've seen so far is strartup, shutdown, wakeup and sleep.